Our Community, Our Justice

Last month, Co-Pastor Michael Rogers preached a sermon on Acts 16. Towards the end, Rogers spoke about the prevalence of prostitution in East New York and the trauma that many of those who are exploited have faced from a young age. In the spirit of Grace’s theme, “Each One, Reach One,” he preached that everyone in our community, from within our households first and into the streets, need to fill every Church seat.

Funny how God works.

Coincidentally, I had attended a community screening and panel discussion hosted by Girls Educational and Mentorship Services, or GEMS, a week prior to the July 24 sermon. Thus, I was prompted to take some time out to participate in the most important part of any social movement: education.

GEMS, the only Non-Government Organization that services sexually exploited youth in New York with mentorship, room and board, job and health counseling, GED programs and a sisterhood for spiritual growth, screened “Very Young Girls” as a kickoff to a yearlong campaign to stomp out sexual exploitation in NY.

The documentary was hard to watch without cringing or getting teary eyed. It was simply too hard for me to accept that the average sexually exploited woman is broken into “the life” at the age of 13, often by rape, drugging, abuse or emotional manipulation; that nearly 300,000 or more women service five to 15 men a night around the clock; that close to 2,500 young women of the City are expected to take the late night strip every year; that 70 to 90 percent of them have yet to recover from sexual abuse as a child and go home to a household permeated with domesticated violence and/or drug abusive families; or that the Johns, the fiends who purchase these exploited women, have the opportunity to avoid the mandatory one-year prison time and $1000 fine for Class A misdemeanors with pilot programs at the Supreme Court that offer a six-hour workshop and a slap on the wrist while the girl they purchased is more commonly subject to three months in prison, a $500 fine and deportation (a common punishment for Filipinas, Thai and Ukrainian women), even after the officer who takes them into the precinct demands them to perform a sexual act before they trick them and take them downtown.

Human trafficking and sexual exploitation is an urgent problem that continuously plagues our community without the dire attention that it warrants. In fact, Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes says that it has escalated over the past few years in Brooklyn. Thankfully, the able D.A. is one of few public officials who have made considerable efforts to take on the issue by creating the Brooklyn Sex-Trafficking Unit, or BKSTU, which includes community education, victim care and a 24/7 hotline to report any information on sex trafficking ((718)-250-2770).

Unfortunately, it usually takes a headline story about 41 shots for us to stand up and take notice. Perhaps some people are discouraged about these “too big to fix” social ills like prostitution, hunger and poverty; especially since they have persisted for millenniums, from the clay-trails of Babylon to the crack-littered-pavement of East New York. But it is that same spirit of apathy and disregard that the prophet Amos preached to have driven the ‘holy’ Israelites into decades of exile and oppression—they were content with worshiping God, yet they continued to forget and under-serve the poor, the widows, the orphans, and generally those who needed the most help from their community; never assume that everything in the Bible is too old or out of context to mirror what is happening today.

Thus, I leave us with a charge to spread awareness and seek preventative measures to address some of the systemic issues that exist in communities of color. After you have familiarized yourself with programs that address the issue, you may want to consider texting “GEMS” to 85944 to directly donate $10 to GEMS’ services.

Also, don’t be afraid to have straight forward and honest conversations with young women about how this issue threatens their community, whether they know it or not. And perhaps equally if not more important, have honest discussions with young black men about lust and temptations. Sure, it’s almost in every rap song that is on my Ipod, but the only reason that I am able to decipher their self-expression from my reality is because of the character and qualities that my parents and mentors have instilled in me.

Once we address the demand for prostitution, the supply (commercially exploited women) will diminish. In economics, they say that there is not much we can do about the supply when there is an inelastic demand — in other words, it is virtually impossible to envision a world where no man will have a lust so uncontrollable that he drives up the blocks of East New York with his last $20 to purchase a beautiful-misguided-woman’s innocence.

But someone forgot to teach economists about Philippians 4:13.